University of Missouri Press, 1993

Southern Women: Histories and Identities has a history. In June 1988 the Southern Association for Women Historians sponsored its first Southern Conference on Women’s History at Converse College in Spartanburg, South Carolina. Although the organizers anticipated that the conference would draw participants whose research reflected all aspects of women’s history from a regional to an international perspective, they were inundated instead with proposals about southern women. Spanning the years between Bacon’s rebellion and the modern civil rights movement, these papers explored issues that separated southern women along the fault lines of race, class, and ethnicity even as their common regional heritage and identity drew them together.